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               NGO: Kenyan Coast a Haven for Child-Porn Producers

   by Jill Craig

   MOMBASA - Kenya's coastal region is one of the nation's poorest, a
   place where vacationers have long exploited rampant poverty and lax law
   enforcement, allowing its sex-tourism industry to flourish.

   As early as 2006, UNICEF reported between 2,000 and 3,000 Kenyan girls
   and boys are involved in a full-time, year-round commercial sex trade.

   In recent years, however, NGO workers have noticed that more children
   are becoming involved in pornography, unwittingly or otherwise.

   "We've been hearing that there are people who come [specifically] to do
   pornography -- and the younger the child, the better the movie," says
   Grace, a Mombasa-based rights advocate for women and children who has
   asked that her last name be withheld. "So most of them go for young
   children."

   An advocate for more than eight years, Grace says many of the children
   with whom she works are reporting an increase in clients taking
   photographs of them nude or having sex.

   "They pay, and by going for the young children, we have many cases
   coming up that many are going into the trade," she says.

   At 22 years of age, Jasmine is employed as a sex worker on the north
   coast of Mombasa. When she was underage, she says, she once agreed to
   have sex with a German man she had met at a bar.

   "So then I stayed with him for four days, then I noticed," she says,
   explaining that the man had been recording their entire interaction
   with a camera the size of a button.

   "I know how to use [a] computer. I asked to check my emails ... I saw
   everything we were doing, he had recorded it," she says. "Then I was
   asking him, [and] he told me `it's gonna sell for a lot of money.' When
   he gets money, he's going to send for me. I told him, `why didn't you
   tell me? You could have told me, we could have agreed, because I need
   money too."

   Availability of technology, ease of digital distribution

   Maureen Karisa, [1]Solidarity with Women in Distress (SOLWADI) CEO,
   says her field officers are seeing new cases of child pornography on a
   daily basis.

   "There are some who even take that pornography with just a pen," she
   says. "I think it's the technology that has come in. That they're able
   to [record] ... you when you're not even aware of what is happening,
   and then they go and sell it."

   But some children know exactly what is happening.

   John started sex work when he was nine. He did his first pornographic
   film when he was 11 and his second when he was 13. Now 17 years old and
   a junior in high school, he says a European man -- a self-professed
   "filmmaker" -- had boys and girls sign a consent form to be recorded
   having group sex, even though Kenyan law defines anyone under the age
   of 18 as a child.

   The production, he says, took place at a rented Mombasa brothel, where
   it could be staged without attracting attention. After being presented
   with alcohol and encouraged to drink, the children, he says, had
   unprotected group sex with older men before a production team.

   "The worst thing is, we did it unprotected," says John, explaining that